What is the Pali word for Run-of-the-mill? Is it ever translated into english in another way?

and thank you in advanceJack

"For a disciple who has conviction in the Teacher's message & lives to penetrate it, what accords with the Dhamma is this:'The Blessed One is the Teacher, I am a disciple. He is the one who knows, not I." - MN. 70 Kitagiri Sutta

"Even though I was endowed with such fortune, such total refinement, the thought occurred to me: 'When an untaught, run-of-the-mill person, himself subject to death, not beyond death, sees another who is dead, he is horrified, humiliated, & disgusted, oblivious to himself that he too is subject to death, not beyond death. And if I — who am subject to death, not beyond death — were to be horrified, humiliated, & disgusted on seeing another person who is dead, that would not be fitting for me.' As I noticed this, the living person's intoxication with life entirely dropped away.

Jack

"For a disciple who has conviction in the Teacher's message & lives to penetrate it, what accords with the Dhamma is this:'The Blessed One is the Teacher, I am a disciple. He is the one who knows, not I." - MN. 70 Kitagiri Sutta

Sanghamitta wrote:I am now wandering down a side path wondering what the origin of run-of-the-mill is...A mill run is of course the stream that worked the water mill to grind the wheat or barley.....

The concept of a "mill" was used by nearly all premodern people to refer to the cyclical astronomical process of precession that takes place over a period of approx. 26,000 years...a process that was understood to cause periodic terrestrial changes. "Run of the mill" in this case would be used to refer to ignorant ordinary (worldly) people who are endlessly subject to the (grinding, repetitive) effects of the general cyclical events of life.

I recommend this book:

Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen

...for a comprehensive look at how all premodern cultures described and related to the endless cycles of cycles that all living beings are subject to.

Last edited by pink_trike on Thu Sep 17, 2009 7:13 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Vision is MindMind is EmptyEmptiness is Clear LightClear Light is UnionUnion is Great Bliss

---The trouble is that you think you have time------Worry is the Interest, paid in advance, on a debt you may never owe------It's not what happens to you in life that is important ~ it's what you do with it ---